High speed, broadband data communications service, such as the Internet, telephony, broadcast TV and video-on-demand, is typically delivered to homes and businesses over optical fiber cable, coaxial cable and copper wire, or various combinations thereof. Optical fiber is a most preferred media for delivery of broadband data communications services, because it has a much greater bandwidth capability than coaxial cable and copper wire. As a result, miles of optical fiber cable have been installed in an attempt to establish a high speed data communications network that interconnects broadband service providers with an end user facility, such as a residential home or apartment building or an office building. The proliferation of optical fiber cable installations, however, has not extended to a large number of end user facilities because of the high cost associated with installing optical fiber cable and associated optical signal equipment between an access point of an optical fiber cable data communications network and an end user facility, such as to the curb of or immediately outside or adjacent to a home or office building.
It is currently known to use a passive optical network (“PON”) implementation for providing high speed, broadband data communications service at geographically distant locations. See, for example, Evans, Shara, STANDARDS WATCH: Passive Optical Networks, CommsWord (May 2001) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Passive Optical Networks (PONs), The International Engineering Consortium (Jul. 27, 2001), incorporated by reference herein. The overall cost of the optical fiber cables and the optical system equipment included in a PON is low relative to its high bandwidth and low loss signal transmission capabilities. A complete PON implementation requires that content is delivered directly to an end user, such as to within a home or business. As optical fiber installations usually do not exist at an end user facility, current PON implementations utilize some form of copper cable, coupled with a high speed data delivery technology, such as VDSL, etc., to bridge the distance between a termination of the PON located outside of the end user facility and broadband data service consumption devices, such as computers, HDTV decoders, etc., within the facility. Consequently, in most PON implementations, a communications cable, such as coaxial or copper cable, and a PON interface device, which is mounted to a utility pole and couples the PON to the communications cable, must be installed to provide the data communications bridge between the home or business and the PON. The cost of installing this final segment of a broadband data communications service network is relatively high, which has hindered the widespread deployment of high speed, broadband services using a PON.
Therefore, there exists a need for extending the high speed, broadband data communications services available on a PON to an end user facility with relative ease and at low cost.